everyday

0% APR intro offers are common, especially for purchases. And you can usually transfer a balance from another card – but you’ll pay fees in the form of a percentage of the amount you transfer. The more you transfer = higher fee.

So when I saw a deal for 15 months of 0% interest on purchases including NO fees on balance transfers, that caught my attention. Then I realized it was with an actually useful Amex card – with a decent welcome bonus. It’s the Amex EveryDay card – learn more here.

Offers like these aren’t as exciting as getting tens of thousands of bonus points. But they can give you a lot of breathing room – especially if you need to plan for a big purchase, or catch up to avoid paying hundreds in interest fees. In this case, for well over a year.

I know I’m gonna need a new HVAC system – to the tune of $6,000 – in the next couple of years

I’ve taken advantage of similar offers in the past. And this one would be a great way to consolidate some balances. Especially if you’re over 5/24.

I use the card as intended, mostly at grocery stores and Costco (for now), with a couple of other purchases here and there. (I use Amazon Allowance to help me meet 30 transactions per month to trigger 1.5 AMEX Membership Rewards points per $1 spent.)

I also wrote about my experience getting the card. It’s the only card I’ve ever been straight-up denied for. Until I called AMEX and asked WTF? and then they approved me anyway.

Bottom line

Along with the stellar offers for 100K points for AMEX Platinum and 50K points for AMEX PRG, add this one to the pool.

I’ve had the card for a year now and really recommend it. It has 0% interest for 15 months to start out, and you can always downgrade it to the no annual fee version after 11 months if you don’t like it.

Were you targeted for anything good on Cardmatch? Was your offer different?

I just reviewed my latest post and I’ve written about Amex a LOT recently. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. Chase’s products are functioning smoothly and as they should; I still love the Arrival card; still jammin’ on my Club Carlson Visa. The only anomaly recently has been with Amex.

In the first photo, from May 2013, you can see that I had luck getting 3 Membership Rewards per dollar for all online transactions, including Amazon Payments. As you can imagine, this was a boon for my manufactured spending. I also got the 3x bonus for Birchbox, an online subscription service.

In the second photo, from March 2014, I got the standard 1 point per dollar – but it is coded as an internet purchase, NOT a cash advance, which is good to know – and it did earn me Membership Rewards points.

Bottom line

I was hanging on to the PRG card for this unpublished benefit. Now that it’s gone, and I have the EveryDay Preferred card, I have no use for this card any mre. And at $175 per year, it screams “cancel me.”

Going forward, I recommend the EveryDay Preferred card unless you know you’ll meet the $30,000 spending threshold to get the 15K Membership Rewards bonus. In all other cases, default to the EveryDay Preferred. You can read more of my analysis of these two cards in this post.

Having that bonus for online transactions was a good benefit. Now that category bonuses are visible on the website, it seems that this benefit has been removed.

Interesting to note: the bonus posted when the statement closed, which is unusual for Amex. The bonus usually posts about two months later after being tantalizingly viewable in the “Pending points” section of Amex for over a month.

In fact, I was SO not expecting that I only found out about it via an email from AwardWallet (which everyone should have if you don’t already).

Sure enough, this was reflected on my Amex account:

Notes/Observations

My rewards accounts are always low. That’s because I earn and BURN. Don’t trust any program for too long. They can and WILL devalue.

15K Membership Rewards is enough for a round-trip ticket to Toronto or Montreal from NYC, or any other short-haul flight on American or US Airways via British Airways Avios. It is also enough to fly to the Caribbean one-way from NYC. It is also enough for a domestic one-way with lots of other programs (Aeroplan and JetBlue come to mind) . Be sure to review the full list of Amex partners and keep all your options open as they have 17 airline partners.

I got my new Amex EveryDay Preferred card the other day. Instead of being really excited about, like usual, I was sorta like, “Hrmph.” My credit limit was not… where I wanted it to be. I wasn’t satisfied by how low it was. Not to worry, I can just switch around lines of credit, right?

Denied again

I have two consumer lines of credit with Amex that are not charge cards: the Delta Skymiles Platinum card and now, the EveryDay Preferred card.

On the Delta card, let’s say I have a $10,000 credit limit, and on the EveryDay, let’s say they gave me $2,000. I have $12,000 in total to switch around however I want, in theory. $6,000 for each, for example. No problem, I thought, I’ll give Amex a call. Read More

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Harlan Vaughn

Hello and welcome to Out and Out! My name is Harlan – I’m a points and miles enthusiast who loves to travel. I am interested in personal finance, the power of positive thinking, and the extraordinary journeys that make life worth living.
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